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God and Freedom

[This paper was presented at Oglethorpe University's Liberal Arts Symposium on April 14, 2009 by me, its author. Don't steal it, under penalty of death.]

 

God and Freedom

            God and free will are frequently placed side by side as compatible ideals. I want to argue that god’s existence is incompatible with free will. I will do this by looking at the notion of divine foreknowledge, and how this affects our freedom.

            To begin with, we must define god. As Anselm said, “God is that of which nothing greater can be thought:” an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. For our purposes, we are primarily interested in the reaches of god’s knowledge. Such knowledge must be infinite, unrestrained by any boundary. If we limit god’s knowledge, then the entity of which we speak ceases to be called god.  Before we even reach the subject of freedom, though, problems arise. This model suggests that god knows for certain what he will do in the future. This is problematic, because god then lacks the power to change his future mind. God’s power becomes limited by his infinite knowledge. In a sense, god loses his own freedom. This conflict between omniscience and omnipotence might suggest that we need to refine our definition of god.

            I would argue, however, that god’s internal inconsistencies are unimportant. Having been defined as an infinite being, the precise details of his workings can lie beyond our grasp. It makes sense that as finite beings, we will perceive some contradictions. In other words, god is all-powerful and all-knowledgeable; he’s free to be paradoxical when he likes.

            The application of divine foreknowledge to human freedom is more interesting. Suppose I am presented with two choices, A and B. If I have free will, it’s anyone’s guess as to which one I will choose. However, god already knows, before I decide, which option I will select. This isn’t a matter of belief on god’s part; it’s necessarily a matter of absolute certainty. If god knows for certain that I will choose B, then A was never really a genuine option. Because of my very limited knowledge, A appeared to be a possible choice when in fact it was not. If my future “choices” are laid at god’s feet in crystal-clear certainty, it’s impossible that my “choices” are freely made.

This is somewhat in conflict with common sense, as we experience ourselves as being free. This is because it is for all practical purposes impossible to know, as an omniscient god must, what the future holds. We may follow a predetermined course, but we are unaware that we do so.

            It might be argued that this conflict between free will and god can be solved by invoking god’s incomprehensibility, as we did to reconcile infinite knowledge with infinite power. This tactic doesn’t seem to me to be applicable in this case. Previously we had an internal inconsistency, in which pieces of our incomprehensibly great being, god, were in conflict with each other. Here, the inconsistency is not internal. Free will is not a given as were infinite knowledge and power. In other words, god can appear to contradict himself, because we have limited understanding of him, but other simpler things like free will cannot contradict god, particularly when such things aren’t made logically necessary.

            There is one problem with this: Free will is necessary to solve the problem of evil. In this model, god can in essence see the future, complete with all its evil acts. This raises the question of why, as an omnibenevolent entity, he doesn’t interfere. I would argue, however, that this problem is also present if we have free will. God would be responsible for our having free will, and by extension what we do with it; god is still ultimately responsible for evil acts wrought by mankind. The problem of evil is present both in the free will and deterministic models.

            Here, we can either revise our definition of god, or our definition of free will. We could argue, for instance, that god does not in fact know what the future holds. This argument might involve the impossibility of certainty regarding future events. Perhaps future events are truly ambiguous right up until they happen, and have no inherent truth value beforehand. Omniscience, then, would have to be redefined as the possession of all possible knowledge.

            This does not appear to me to be a promising tack. By modifying god’s omniscience to exclude future events, we are turning god into a limited entity. As we have already established, limitation of god is incoherent. Perhaps we could argue that future events appear to be necessarily ambiguous to us, but to apply the same restriction to an infinite being seems an improper move.

Another possible reconciliation of god and freedom, titled “middle knowledge,” was proposed by Molina in the 16^th century. Laing offers this summery:

The theory of middle knowledge presents a picture of divine omniscience which includes not only knowledge of the past, present and future, but also knowledge of conditional future contingents (propositions which refer to how free creatures will choose in various circumstances), counterfactuals (propositions which refer to how things would actually be if circumstances were different than they are or will be), and counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (propositions which refer to what a free creature would have chosen (freely) to do if things had been different).

However, it seems to me that middle knowledge merely pushes the issue back a step. God still knows what I’ll do in any given situation. We are still left with a scenario in which the outcomes of what we call choices are already known by an omniscient god. Perhaps god freely chooses which scenarios to actualize, but the outcome of my own choices remains fixed in god’s omniscience.

            Another line of reasoning might suggest that divine foreknowledge does not in fact force future events, but merely coincides with them. Rudavsky sums up a response:

[It has been] suggested that the analysis of God’s foreknowledge follows that of human knowledge in that both involve belief states. Divine knowledge, however, unlike its human counterpart, is infallible. Hence the phrase “God foreknows p” can be unpacked as

2.1 God believes p in advance of the occurrence of p

2.2 p is true

2.3 God is incapable of error

The crucial part of this analysis is 2.3, that is, the emphasis upon God’s infallibility. It is God’s infallibility, coupled with his prior knowledge, rather than the causal force of his knowledge, which carries with it the suggestion of the necessity of the objects of his knowledge.

This analysis seems to me to be correct. In other words, it is the fact that god is incapable of error that brings with it the future as he has foreknown it.

         To conclude, it appears that the reconciliation of god and freedom is a difficult project indeed: Divine foreknowledge seems to prevent human freedom. I’ve argued that various tactics of joining the two, including Molina’s concept of middle knowledge and curtailing god’s omniscience, are ultimately unpersuasive.

 

Works Cited

Laing, John D. “Middle Knowledge.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/, 2005

Rudavsky, Tamar. “Divine Omniscience and Future Contingents in Gersonides.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21(4), 1983: 513-516.

 

Incoherencies in the book, “How Do You Spell God?”

I do not like this book very much at all, for the following reasons.

A religion is a bunch of big answers to the really big questions.

Okay, that’s fine.

[...] religions have real good answers to real big questions.

…That’s not fine. At all.

I would have less of a problem with this if the authors substantiated this claim, but they don’t. They just state it. And it’s patently false.

The way we see it, there are four big questions all the religions in the world try to answer:

1. “What’s our place in the world?”
2. “How can we live the right way?”
3. “How do we pray?”
4. “What happens to us after we die?”

If something answers these questions, it’s a religion; if it doesn’t, it isn’t!

WHAT?! With the exception of #3, this is a patent falsehood. We can amend the last sentence, however, to “If something answers these questions [and such answers are arbitrary and require faith-based belief], it’s a religion; if it [answers these questions (with the exception of #3, which is inherently religious) using sound reasoning to arrive at logical conclusions], it isn’t.”

Sigh. These people need an editor.

Here’s the next gem:

We don’t want all the religions to melt down into one big religion. This would be boring and would make the world very dull. It would be like having [...] just one flavor of ice cream.

No, no, no. This is a category mistake. There’s lots of flavors of ice cream because there’s no right flavor. You’ll notice, though, that there aren’t lots of answers to things like, “What color is the sky?” or “What is 4 times 9?” because with questions like that, there are right and wrong answers. Similarly, the “real big questions” that religion attempts (and usually fails) to answer also have concrete answers. There is no, “What’s your favorite flavor of what happens when you die?” We don’t know for sure what the answers are. We may never know, but that shouldn’t stop us from looking for them.

So, in a sense, the religions should melt together, if they knew what they were doing. At that point, though, it would cease to be called a religion, and would just be a collection of universally agreed-upon facts.

If you live long enough, you will meet somebody who hates religions.

I guess that would be me. Congratulations, reader, you’ve lived long enough!

One of the things people who hate religions say a lot is, “Religions divide people and teach them to hate each other.”

We say a lot of other stuff, too, but we’ll stick with that for now, I suppose.

This is ridiculous, and here’s what we say to people who don’t like religions: “Look around this world! Look at the people who are doing good stuff, the people who are giving out soup to hungry folks, [etc.] Can’t you see that lots of these people doing good stuff have a religion that taught them to do it?”

Not as many as the authors suggest, no. Furthermore, as charity organizations, religious institutions are miserably ineffective, as they have so many irrelevant overhead costs. How many more bowls of soup could we have given out had we not bothered to construct megachurches, marble alters, gold cross necklaces?

Then we say, “Look around this world at the people who are doing bad stuff. [...] Can’t you see that none of these people learned how to do that bad stuff from a religion?”

I’m looking. I’m seeing suicide bombers. I’m seeing holy wars. I’m seeing ruthless manslaughter in the name of religion splattering blood all over the timeline of history. The authors completely failed here.

We know that y ou can be a good person even if you have no religion.

Well, that’s certainly good to know!

[...] The teachings of religion are behind all the good things people do.

Whoa, there. Do I even need to address this?

People can come up with moral values on their own, without the help of religious doctrine. If we have any doubt, we can simply check out, for instance, the Richard Dawkins foundation, or any other charity that is not founded in a faith tradition. The teachings of religion are simply not behind every good thing anyone has ever done, and the claim that they are is quite frankly completely, wholly, and utterly wrong.

[...] when somebody says that religions divide people and teach them to hate each other, you should stand up and tell them that they are full of baloney.

Wait. So we’re saying religion doesn’t divide people… and then we’re calling for religious people to tell nonreligious people that they’re filled with baloney?

“Religion teaches people to love each other! If anyone tells you otherwise, tell ‘em to go **** themselves!!!”

The sad part is, one of the authors has a Ph.D… in philosophy.

The sadder part is, we’ve only made it to page four.